Charles E. Blair,
keeper from 1862 to 1864, witnessed Confederate
prisoners being transported to Boston Harbor’s Fort Warren, which
served as a prison during the Civil War. The next keeper, Thomas Bates,
took over in July 1864 and remained until his death in April 1893. The
light station was the scene of many happy gatherings during the
Bates era. Frequent sing-alongs took place, with the
accompaniment of
Assistant Keeper Edward Gorham on accordion. When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder
and Crossing
the Bar were special favorites.

On January 31, 1882, Keeper Bates, along with an assistant and a local
fisherman, rescued the crew of the Fanny Pike, which
had run into Shag Rocks.

A brick cistern was added in 1884 in a building near the tower. The
cistern held 21,800 gallons of rainwater for the keepers and their
families. A second keeper’s house was added in 1885, located at the
opposite end of the island from the lighthouse. Two houses had become a
necessity with three keepers and their families living on the island
with their families.

Thomas
Bates, Jr., Keeper of Boston Light 1864-1893

A Daboll compressed- air fog trumpet replaced the
bell in 1872. It
remained in use until 1887, when a steam-driven siren replaced it. In
the late nineteenth century, students from the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology conducted experiments with fog signals at Boston Light,
trying to perfect a signal that would penetrate the so-called “ghost
walk,” an area about six miles east of the lighthouse where no sound
could penetrate.

Despite the students’ best efforts, even the largest
horn could not penetrate the ghost walk.

Alfred M. Horte had a
brief stay as keeper after the death of Bates. Henry L. Pingree was
keeper from 1894 to 1909. Pingree’s son, Wesley, who was an assistant
keeper at Deer Island Light in Boston Harbor, married Horte’s sister,
Josephine.

Left:
Late nineteenth century view, courtesy of U.S. Coast Guard.

An auxiliary light was added to the station in
1890—a fixed white light
exhibited from a small wooden building. The light was designed to help
mariners avoid dangerous Harding’s Ledge. If they strayed too
far from
the channel to either side, a red light was seen.

The next keeper, Levi B. Clark, weathered a
tremendous blizzard on Christmas Day in 1909. The five-masted
schooner Davis
Palmer struck Finn’s Ledge and sank with all hands in the
storm, and some of the wreckage came ashore at Little Brewster Island.

Charles
Jennings, a Cape Cod native previously stationed at Monomoy Point
Light, became keeper in 1916 at a yearly salary of $804. Jennings, who
received a commendation from the secretary of Commerce for the rescue
of 24 men from the Coast Guard patrol boat Alacrity, moved on
to be the keeper of the range lights at Lovell’s Island in 1919.

John Lelan Hart was keeper from 1919 to 1926. In
1921, Hart and his
assistant, William J. Howard—who later gained fame as a lifesaver at
Wing’s Neck Light—were credited with saving the life of the second
assistant keeper, whose boat had capsized. Hart was involved in several
more rescues during his stay.

Left: The
unveiling of a tablet at Boston Light on December 2, 1934, listing the
station’s keepers. From left to right: J. Leland Hart, keeper from 1919
to 1926; Charles Jennings, keeper from 1916 to 1919; Maurice Babcock,
keeper from 1926 to 1941, and Fitz-Henry Smith, author the 1911 book
The Story of Boston Light.
From the collection of Edward Rowe Snow, courtesy of Dorothy Bicknell.

Archford "Ted" Haskins was first assistant keeper for a
decade beginning in 1927. Every chore was more difficult at an
island light station. When she wanted to wash the family's clothes,
Haskins' wife, Betty, had to collect the water a bucket at a time from
the basement. The water would be heated on a stove overnight, and the
clothes were washed using a washboard and lye soap.

The
Haskins children spent weekends and vacations on the island, and stayed
in a boardinghouse on the mainland during the school week.
Transportation was via a small boat called the Dolittle -- so named because it did
little.

Ted
Haskins picked up large quantities of food on the mainland when he had
the opportunity. Canned food comprised most of the family's diet in
winter. “If they had to have corn chowder three nights in a row,
that’s what they did," said Haskins' daughter Marla Haskins Rogers in
an interview many years later.

The Babcocks’ children boarded in the nearby towns
of Winthrop or
Hull so they could attend school, and they spent their vacations on
Little Brewster. On one occasion, Keeper Babcock rowed through
dangerous ice floes to Hull to pick up his son, Bill, during a February
vacation. The keeper’s wife watched her husband fight off giant ice
cakes as he headed for Hull. She lost sight of him for an agonizing two
hours. Finally, she caught sight of the returning dory, with her
husband rowing and their son fending off the ice. “After I had given
them a good scolding,” she later said, “I sat them down to a hot supper
and we had a pleasant holiday.” Bill Babcock later carried on the
family tradition, becoming a keeper at Graves Light in Boston Harbor.

The Babcocks were on the island for the
devastating hurricane of
September 21, 1938, which struck New England without warning. As the
winds picked up late that afternoon, Keeper Babcock had to crawl on his
hands and knees to reach the lighthouse. A dock at the island was
wrecked by the storm. Babcock and one of his assistants spent the night
in the lighthouse lantern, making sure the light stayed lit. Babcock’s
log entries, now at the National Archives, make note of the storm but
mention nothing of his own extraordinary efforts.

Maurice
Babcock

In late 1939, Keeper Babcock lost part of a finger in an
accident with a motor on the island. He spent a few weeks in Boston
recuperating. In a newspaper article during that period, he said that
he had never driven an automobile and had no intention of doing so. By
boat, he could reach Boston’s South Station in 50 minutes,
much faster than the trip by car from Hull. “We do our shopping for
groceries just as anybody else does,” he told the reporter. “The only
difference is that we are farther from the store. We lay in larger
supplies than most people, on account of the distance. We can’t trot
out to the chain store if we happen to forget the coffee.”

A
grandson of Keeper Maurice Babcock taking an outdoor bath on the pier
at Little Brewster Island
July 31, 1940Courtesy of Dorothy Bicknell

Maurice Babcock in Oct. 1941, shortly
before his retirement. Courtesy of Dorothy Bicknell.

Friends of the Babcocks threw the family a farewell party on the island
on the day of the keeper’s retirement in November 1941.

Edward Rowe
Snow accompanied Babcock on his final trip up the lighthouse stairs and
later wrote:

It was a sad journey we made
that afternoon, and as we reached the lantern room he looked fondly at
the lenses and the lighting apparatus with its gas mantle, all of which
he would never see again.

Then Maurice Babcock, twenty-fifth keeper of
Boston Light, stepped out on the platform that surrounds the tower and
looked out to sea. Neither of us spoke, but each knew what was in the
other’s mind—the old days of the lighthouse service were gone forever,
never to return.

The Coast Guard took over the management of the nation’s lighthouses in
1939, and civilian keepers were given the option of remaining civilians
or joining the Coast Guard. Ralph C. Norwood, an assistant under
Maurice Babcock, enlisted in the Coast Guard and became the next keeper
in 1941.

The
1930s had been exciting years for the Norwoods. In 1932, Josephine
Norwood, Ralph’s wife, was expecting their seventh child. (She would
have nine children by the time she reached 27.) During a spring storm,
Josephine believed the birth was imminent and a doctor was summoned
from Hull. It took an hour and a half for the boat to land at the
island in heavy seas. As it turned out, Georgia wasn’t born until a
week later in calm weather, but the headlines from the night of the
storm forever stamped Georgia as the “Storm Child.”

The writer Ruth Carmen based a novel called Storm Child on the
story. The book was a highly fictionalized version of the Norwoods’
story that even included a tidal wave destroying the lighthouse.
Georgia and her parents were showered with publicity, and they traveled
to New York City to appear on the nationally broadcast We the People radio
program.

Hollywood subsequently came calling to make a movie version of Storm Child, and
five-year-old Georgia was slated to play herself. Described as “smiling
and sunny-curled,” Georgia was to be the “Bay State’s own Shirley
Temple.” The movie never happened. “I would not separate the children,”
said Josephine. “Each one was as precious
as the other and they all needed my supervision.” Apparently Georgia
agreed, reportedly saying, “I don’t want to go to Hollywood. I want to
go back to Boston Light.”

The legend of the Storm Child lived on just the same. Georgia’s son,
Willie Emerson, later wrote a book called First Light, which
relating relates the true story of his mother’s birth and life at
Boston Light. “The days spent on Boston Light were busy ones,”
Josephine told her grandson for his book, “with eleven of us to cook
for. . . . As we never knew when inspection of the houses, tower and
fog signal would be held, it was a matter of course to have the beds
made, the dishes done, and the sweeping and dry mopping done by ten
o’clock. Of course our children were brought up to help with the work.
Then they had their time to swim, go fishing, walking over the bar at
low tide, or go rowing.”

In the 1930s, there were three families and as many as
19 children living on the tiny island. The school-aged Norwood children
lived with their mother in Hull during the school year, but they always
looked forward to their glorious summers on the island. “You never
relaxed until they were all safely in bed at night,” said Josephine.
She once rigged a leash attached to the clothesline for her young son,
Bobbie, but “Georgia felt sorry for him and untied him.”

Ralph Norwood’s daughter, Priscilla (Reece), later
remembered that her father would go to Hull once a month for groceries.
“Sometimes he would take one of us kids with him,” she recalled,. “and
the grocers would feel sorry and give you a cabbage or something.”
Attempts to maintain a vegetable garden on the island met with little
success, as the soil was poor.

The Norwoods, of
course, always had plenty of seafood. The children
would harvest the plentiful crabs, periwinkles, and mussels from the
shores of the island. The older children made money by lobstering.

Summers were lively, with filled with rowboat races and pie- eating
contests with the children who summered on nearby Great Brewster. Games
of all sorts were played, even baseball—in the water was an instant
automatic out.

Life was generally harmonious, although Maurice Babcock Jr. did get a
punch in the nose once from one of the Norwood girls. He had trespassed
onto the Norwoods’ part of the island.

In the winters, the children boarded in Hull or Winthrop where they
attended school, waiting eagerly for vacations and their glorious
summers back on Little Brewster.

The Norwood
family in 1946

Back row:
Georgia, Wanda, Fay, Josephine, Ralph

Front row:
Bob, Bruce, Dexter, Priscilla, Gail, Ralph II, Spunky

Courtesy of
Willie Emerson

Courtesy of
Willie Emerson

The Norwoods left the
island in 1945. Bruce Norwood said years later, “I’ve never been in
another place that felt like the home Boston Light was.”

One of Ralph and Josephine’s
sons, Gail, later became a lightkeeper in Nova Scotia, making four
generations of keepers in the family.

Boston Light was extinguished during World War
II, and it went back
into operation in July 1945. The light was converted to electricity in
1948, and shortly after that the clockwork mechanism that rotated the
lens was replaced by an electric motor. The second-order Fresnel lens
remains in use today.

A child was born on the island in March 1950 to Mary Ellen Lavigne,
wife of Joseph E. Lavigne, the Coast Guard’s principal keeper. When the
baby’s birth was imminent, low tide prevented the keeper from launching
a boat to get his wife to the mainland.

A doctor eventually was rushed
over from Pemberton Point in Hull in a Coast Guard boat, and Joseph Jr.
was delivered the baby at 7:30 a.m. Mary Ellen was later
taken to
Quincy City Hospital to recuperate. The couple’s son, Joseph Jr., was
their the couple’s first son and their fourth child.

In 1960, it was decided that the smaller 1885
seven-room keeper’s
house would suffice for the island’s Coast Guard personnel. The 1859
duplex dwelling had badly deteriorated. a A 1949
inspection reported that the ceiling in the kitchen was falling down
and there were rat holes in the house. The Coast Guard razed the house
structure in the spring of 1960. After that, Coast Guardsmen lived at
the station without their families.

Left: The
Lavigne family at Boston Light.

The remaining 1885
keeper's house

Boatswain’s Mate First Class William “Mike” Mikelonis
was the Coast Guard keeper at Boston Light for several years beginning
in 1962. The Coast Guard staff at that time spent two weeks on the
island and one week off.

Mikelonis and other keepers over the years have enjoyed
great fishing off the ledges. When Mikelonis retired in 1967, he said
he had caught overmore than 1,000 striped bass, two of them
over 50 pounds. Upon his retirement, Mikelonis was presented
with the bulb that burned in the tower on his last day of duty.

Mikelonis shared the island with two assistants and a
shaggy black dog named Salty, one of a long line of Boston Light dogs.
Salty was succeeded by Salty II, and later by Farah (named during the
era of Charlie’s
Angels and Farah Fawcett), a friendly mutt who lived for
13 years on Little Brewster. Farah would whine and shake when taken to
the mainland. Once, at low tide, Farah wandered over to Great Brewster
Island, and 11 puppies resulted from her short trip away from home.
Farah died in November 1989, and her final resting place is a marked
grave not far from the cistern building.
Click here to see a video clip of Farah in the late 1980s.

A later dog was named Shadwell in honor of the slave who
drowned with the first keeper. Cats have also lived at the station,
including a frisky black cat named Ida Lewis, after America’s most
famous woman lighthouse keeper.

Some people have reported weird happenings on Little Brewster over the
years. Russell Anderson was a Coast Guard keeper in 1947. One day,
his 22-year-old wife, Mazie, was walking along the shore. She
heard footsteps close behind her, but saw no one when she turned
around. That night as she tried to sleep, Mazie felt a presence in the
room. Later she heard what she described as “horrible maniacal
laughter” coming from the boathouse. On another night she heard the
same sound coming from the fog signal house. This time a little girl’s
sobbing voice followed, calling “Shaaaadwell!” over and over.

Mazie Anderson related this story in an article for Yankee magazine
many years later. She said that on one occasion the fog signal engines
started themselves and the light mysteriously went on by itself. Mazie
saw a mysteriousn unfamiliar figure outlined against the lens. Soon she
again heard the man’s laughing voice and the girl’s sobbing cries. It
wasn’t until years later that Mazie Anderson read that the Boston Light
slave’s name was Shadwell—the same name repeated by the little girl’s
voice.

Petty Officer First Class Dennis Dever, the Coast Guard officer in
charge in the late 1980s, had a few odd experiences. While working in
the station’s boathouse, he liked to have his radio tuned to a rock
station. Often, with nobody else in the boathouse, the station would
change itself to a classical station. Dever said he and other Coast
Guard crew attributed events like this to “Old George”—Worthylake, that
is.

Dennis Dever, Coast Guard keeper, in the lantern room in 1989

One day, Dever was in the kitchen of the keeper’s house looking out the
window at the tower, and he clearly saw a man in the lantern room. This
was alarming, as the only other person on the island was his assistant
in the next room. From a distance, it appeared that the figure at the
top of the tower was wearing an old fashioned keeper’s uniform. Dever
rushed to the tower and went up the stairs, finding but he found the
lantern room empty.

Reports of mysterious figures seen in the tower and in the keeper’s
house continue to the present day. A number of people have described
the ghostly figure of a woman in a white nightgown at the top of the
tower.

By 1989, the Coast Guard had automated every lighthouse
in the United States and Boston Light was scheduled to be the last in
this process. Preservation groups appealed to Congress and the Coast
Guard, and with the help of Senator Edward M. Kennedy funding was
appropriated to keep Coast Guard staff on Little Brewster, making the
island a living museum of lighthouse history.

In 1990, Historic Boston, Inc., and the Massachusetts
Department of Environmental Management commissioned a Stewardship Plan
and preservation guidelines for Boston Light. As a result of the study,
much work has been done on the island in recent years, including the
replacing of trim on the keeper's house and the repainting of all the
buildings.

This small museum
of artifacts in the base of the tower was started by CWO Ken
Black,

officer in charge at Coast Guard
Station Point Allerton in the 1960s

Boston Light became the last lighthouse in the United
States to be automated on April 16, 1998, but a Coast Guard crew
continued to perform all the other traditional keepers' duties except
for turning the light on at sunset and turning it off at sunrise. The
light currently operates 24 hours a day.

Coast Guard Auxiliary (volunteer) personnel have worked
on the island since 1980, and women have often been part of the crew.
Auxiliarists Sally Snowman and James Thomson of Plymouth,
Massachusetts, were married on Little Brewster Island in 1994. The
couple published a book called Boston Light: A Historical
Perspective.It was the first book
written about Boston Light's history in over 80 years.

Sally Snowman (right) in 2003 with Connie
Small, author of the book The Lighthouse Keeper's Wife

In September 2003, Sally Snowman was appointed as the
new civilian keeper -- the first civilian keeper since the Coast Guard
took over in 1941, and the first woman keeper in the lighthouse's long
history. The active duty Coast Guard personnel that had been assigned
to the island were relocated to meet the needs of Homeland Security.
There is one Coast Guard engineer currently assigned to work with the
keeper to ensure the facility is sufficiently maintained. The Coast
Guard Auxiliary personnel at Boston Light are now referred to as
Watchstanders, and in 2000 a program was established for their training.

National Park rangers are also present during the days
the island is open from June to October. The rangers are there during
the day only, while the Watchstander Program requires staying overnight
on the island for four to seven-day stretches.

During a 1996
renovation

You can see Boston Light distantly from the shores of
Hull, Revere and Winthrop, and from high buildings in Boston. The Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands
run several special trips to Little Brewster Island every summer, and
the National Park Service runs trips
from Boston in season. Visitors on these trips get
to climb the 76 stairs to the top of Boston Light for a breathtaking
view of Boston Harbor.

If you visit Little Brewster be sure to look on the
rocks for initials and names carved by keepers and visitors to Boston
Light, some dating back to the 1700s.

(This
list is a work in progress. If you have any information on the keepers
of this lighthouse, I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at nelights@gmail.com.
Anyone copying this list onto another web site does so at their own
risk, as the list is always subject to updates and corrections.)